This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Alex O'Lean read her story Quarantine

from the January 30th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

O'Lean has published two novels and two short story collections, including Signs and Wonders,

which was published in 2012.

This is her first story in The New Yorker.

Now here's Alex O'Lean.

Quarantine Bridget lived in Barcelona for a year.

First she stayed with her college friends Maya and Andrew, who were trying to be poets,

and then she sublet from a man named Marco whom she'd met at a grocery store.

She had a fling with a woman named Bernadette, who

was from New Zealand, and shared a flat with a Scott named Laurie, whom Bridget also slept with,

and that was the end of things with Bernadette. Bridget smoked Fortuna cigarettes and wrote

furiously in her journal about people she'd known and slept with, or wanted to sleep with, or had slept with,

and then been rejected by.

She was 23 years old.

One night at Marco's apartment, she was awakened by loud knocking.

Still semi-drunk from an evening with Maya and Andrew,

she stumbled to the door and opened it to find three junkies standing

there, asking for Marco. She knew they were junkies because Marco was a junkie, he told her

this, and all his friends were junkies too. They needed Marco's furniture for reasons that

...